ABSTRACT
In 1998 the late Yvonne Vera published Butterfly Burning , her great novel set in the Bulawayo townships in the 1940s. Yvonne did no archival research, nor did she carry out formal oral interviews. She relied on shared family memories and especially on music – the township jazz which beats through the book and is described in some of its most vivid passages. Butterfly Burning is dedicated to me and I have taken it as a challenge and an inspiration. What might be achieved, I asked myself, by a historian who did do archival and oral research? So I have been working towards a social history of the town between 1893 and 1960 to be entitled Bulawayo Burning. I have published several articles which together represent about half of the book: an analysis of the meaning of urban violence in Bulawayo, comparing the “faction fights” of 1929 to the “zhii” 1 riots of 1960; an account of the fraught relations between the city of Bulawayo and the Rhodesian state; a discussion of the politics of burial in the Bulawayo townships; papers on the gendering of photography and on the history of bicycles in the city (“Pictures”; “Bicycles”; “Dignifying Death”; “Meaning of Urban Violence”; “City”).
